Gatherings like GOSH [are] essential to making changes to larger systems of doing science and institutional trajectories.GOSH 2016 Participant

Without hardware, there is no science. Instruments, reagents, computers, and lab equipment are the platforms for producing systematic knowledge. Yet, current supply chains limit access and impede creativity and customization through high mark-ups and proprietary designs. This can be compounded by private hardware licenses and patents. Open Science Hardware (OSH) addresses part of this problem by sharing designs, instructions for building, and protocols.

Expanding the reach of Open Science Hardware within academic research, NGO initiatives, citizen science, and education has potential to increase access to experimental tools and facilitate their customization and reuse while lowering costs. A growing number of people and organizations around the world are developing and using Open Science Hardware, but a coherent, self-organizing community has yet to emerge that could raise its profile and drive required social change within institutions, laws, and common practice that would make open science with open hardware the norm.

The Gathering for Open Science Hardware will build a roadmap and bring together the people, skills and tools needed to make open science hardware ubiquitous by 2025.

Advancing open hardware in academia, I never thought it would be possible to make it a reality…Now I think it is possible, and I am invested in it.GOSH 2016 Participant

GOSH 2016 brought together community leaders for the first international and interdisciplinary conference focused on Open Science Hardware. The extended group that was created is dynamic and engaged. Other participants found the diversity of attendees and their passion for change the most important feature of the meeting. Our work was featured at Mozilla Festival, Science Hackday PDX, Borders Festival, Interactivos! 2016 and in publications including Nature News, Global Young Academy Connections, Lab Times, Makery and the Guardian.

Ongoing activities of the GOSH community since March 2016 include setting up an Open Access journal for open science hardware at Ubiquity Press with over ten GOSH participants on the editorial board; authoring the GOSH Community Manifesto which has now been translated into six languages; co-organising The Brazilian Gathering for Free and Open Source Hardware (e-HAL) that took place in October 2016.

The theme of GOSH 2017 is Building a movement

The goal is to bring the spirit of the GOSH Manifesto to life. This includes concrete outcomes for individual participants, like sharing experiences as users and developers of open science hardware, identifying best practices, collaborating to create opportunities and address failures, and building lasting friendships.

Scaling up the community, we will welcome up to 100 people from more countries and broader backgrounds than was possible in 2016.

Establishing working groups to tackle complex problems like design of sustainable business models, design strategies for calibration and reproducibility of measurements, interactions with open and citizen science.

Engaging local communities, taking advantage of being located in Chile to form local connections and raise the profile of open technologies for science in the region.

Launching our roadmap for open science hardware in print form to present to policy makers and decision makers.

Support GOSH

We are looking for sponsorship partners to enable people to participate in GOSH who might not otherwise be able to travel.